Conventionally, a broadcasting station which offers a broadcasting service by the analog ground wave broadcasting has already allocated frequency band for use, to transmit its own program data using the allocated frequency band. A receiver installed in a viewer's house (hereinafter referred to as an IRD (an Integrated Receiver Decoder)) selects program data of a desired broadcasting station, from program data to be sent from broadcasting stations, and displays the program data of the selected broadcasting station on an external monitor by decoding the data, in accordance with a station selecting operation by the viewer.
Incidentally, in an analogue ground wave broadcasting system, it has been proposed to periodically distribute data indicating contents of programs that is called an electronic program guide information (hereinafter referred to as an EPG (an Electronic Program Guide)), from a specific broadcasting station, for informing a viewer of programs to be provided by each broadcasting station. The EPG data includes information such as a program title, a broadcasting date and time, a broadcasting channel, and description of a program, and will be used to determine which program a viewer watches.
In this case, the IRD receives and stores in a memory the EPG data, which is periodically sent from a broadcasting station that transmits the EPG data, and reads out the EPG data from the memory and displays it on an external monitor in accordance with a displaying operation by the viewer. In this way, the viewer can decide a program that the viewer watches, by viewing the EPG data displayed on the monitor.
Incidentally, although the EPG data includes information on an enormous number of programs, a display screen of the monitor limits the display of the EPG data. It is the reason why the IRD can only display information on a part of programs out of the enormous numbers of programs, on the display screen of the monitor. Therefore, a viewer needs to perform a scrolling operation to retrieve a desired program out of the enormous number of programs, which makes the viewer do bothering work.
Here, in order to resolve such a bothering retrieving operation, there has been considered a method in which a keyword is inputted for retrieving a desired program from the enormous number of programs included in the EPG data, retrieval of the program is executed based on the inputted keyword, and a result of retrieval is displayed on the display screen of the monitor.
However, with this method, since a user has to perform an operation such as to input a keyword with a keyboard or the like, the method is not enough to reduce operation for retrieval. In addition, since the retrieval of the program is executed based on only the keyword, a program that does not match the user's preference might be retrieved.